March 2, 2005: Headlines: COS - Jamaica: Photography: San Francisco Bay Guardian: In his latest series on the American middle class, Leisure, RPCV photographer Bill Owens looks back at the way we raged

Almost 30 years later, Owens is back with a new volume, Leisure (Fotofolio), a collection of pictures from the same era, this time focusing on a specific aspect of suburban life, that is, playtime. The photographs, some of which are on view at the Robert Koch Gallery, show us the lifestyle rewards for all the commuter mileage Dad put on the Pinto and the isolated ennui Mom and the kids endured in the tract house. Owens depicts suburbanites, most from Livermore, heading off on a family trip with their powerboat, playing volleyball with the neighbors, do-si-do-ing at square dances, shopping at swap meets, and screaming on the sidelines at a Bee Gees concert. The pictures are usually accompanied by revealing captions provided by the subjects: "I'm just killing time" is the inscription beneath a picture of teens in a pinball arcade. Winkle in time

"I look at myself as Rip Van Winkle," Owens tells me over the phone from his home in Hayward. "I just had someone give me a scolding when I asked him why my prints don't sell for $18,000, like William Eggleston's. 'Because you didn't do anything for 20 years,' my friend replied. It set my career back. Well, I'm no longer invisible." Indeed. Besides the San Francisco exhibition, the Leisure pictures will be in upcoming shows in England, Spain, and Austria.

The Leisure images are intoxicating in the way that they mix nostalgia with a knowing hindsight and the idea of a culture about to lose its innocence. Owens was a photojournalist witness to the notorious 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, where Hells Angels were implicated in killing a man. The photographs are pre-AIDS, pre-recovery culture, pre-political correctness (the suburban scenes are notably not multicultural, despite the images of karate and Chinese cooking classes).

On the back cover of Leisure, Owens writes that the project was "like being a National Geographic photographer with the assignment of photographing my own world." The approach lent the pictures a kind of bemusement rather than a sneer. "I'm sensitive to the cheap shot; I don't pander," he stresses over the phone.

"I am socially concerned. I want to see a just society," he admits, adding that he was raised a Quaker. He finds it difficult to stay off political topics. "The Republicans aren't making a better society. Let's start working on basic things: let's legalize marijuana and make a billion on taxes to help pay for health care."

Owens, who at 66 has a hearty eccentric manner, is also quick to point out that he hasn't been twiddling his thumbs since the early 1980s. "Back then, I was making images about our society. But I was not interested in being a starving artist. I had to get a job."

Mind you, his career choice was one with independent spirit: in 1983, he founded Buffalo Bill's Brewery in Hayward, the first microbrewery pub in the country, and published American Brewer magazine. "I'm one of the most famous people in that industry," he flatly boasts. He's currently heavily involved with the microbrew equivalent of distilleries (go to www.distilling.com). 'The crap we eat'

It's not surprising that Owens is a foodie. While many of the Leisure pictures, he says, were shot with a formidable 8-by-10 camera – "I wanted to do the hardest thing you could do, capture the Decisive Moment like Cartier-Bresson" – these days he's using a faster, less cumbersome digital camera to document the contemporary American diet, in still images he's putting into book form and in short digital movies. He also distributes his recent pictures online: "If you want to get whacked-out jpegs, get on my e-mail list," he offers (go to www.billowens.com).

The new images, he says, "are about the crap we eat, not Gourmet magazine. We eat poorly. Corn syrup is what makes us fat. You're better off with regular sugar." He digresses on a lengthy tirade about poor nutrition that suggests there's more social criticism in his earlier work than meets the eye.

And as mentioned earlier, his eyes are wide open. When asked about his current impressions of suburbia, he replies trenchantly, "I don't think suburbia has changed one bit. Now people just have 60-inch TVs."

When this story was posted in March 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:

The Peace Corps LibraryPeace Corps Online is proud to announce that the Peace Corps Library is now available online. With over 30,000 index entries in over 500 categories, this is the largest collection of Peace Corps related reference material in the world. From Acting to Zucchini, you can use the Main Index to find hundreds of stories about RPCVs who have your same interests, who served in your Country of Service, or who serve in your state.

March 1: National Day of ActionTuesday, March 1, is the NPCA's National Day of Action. Please call your Senators and ask them to support the President's proposed $27 Million budget increase for the Peace Corps for FY2006 and ask them to oppose the elimination of Perkins loans that benefit Peace Corps volunteers from low-income backgrounds. Follow this link for step-by-step information on how to make your calls. Then take our poll and leave feedback on how the calls went.

Coates Redmon, Peace Corps Chronicler Coates Redmon, a staffer in Sargent Shriver's Peace Corps, died February 22 in Washington, DC. Her book "Come as You Are" is considered to be one of the finest (and most entertaining) recountings of the birth of the Peace Corps and how it was literally thrown together in a matter of weeks. If you want to know what it felt like to be young and idealistic in the 1960's, get an out-of-print copy. We honor her memory.

Make a call for the Peace CorpsPCOL is a strong supporter of the NPCA's National Day of Action and encourages every RPCV to spend ten minutes on Tuesday, March 1 making a call to your Representatives and ask them to support President Bush's budget proposal of $345 Million to expand the Peace Corps. Take our Poll: Click here to take our poll. We'll send out a reminder and have more details early next week.

Peace Corps Calendar: Tempest in a Teapot?Bulgarian writer Ognyan Georgiev has written a story which has made the front page of the newspaper "Telegraf" criticizing the photo selection for his country in the 2005 "Peace Corps Calendar" published by RPCVs of Madison, Wisconsin. RPCV Betsy Sergeant Snow, who submitted the photograph for the calendar, has published her reply. Read the stories and leave your comments.

WWII participants became RPCVsRead about two RPCVs who participated in World War II in very different ways long before there was a Peace Corps. Retired Rear Adm. Francis J. Thomas (RPCV Fiji), a decorated hero of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died Friday, Jan. 21, 2005 at 100. Mary Smeltzer (RPCV Botswana), 89, followed her Japanese students into WWII internment camps. We honor both RPCVs for their service.

Bush's FY06 Budget for the Peace CorpsThe White House is proposing $345 Million for the Peace Corps for FY06 - a $27.7 Million (8.7%) increase that would allow at least two new posts and maintain the existing number of volunteers at approximately 7,700. Bush's 2002 proposal to double the Peace Corps to 14,000 volunteers appears to have been forgotten. The proposed budget still needs to be approved by Congress.

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Story Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Jamaica; Photography

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